Talk:Data Retention Directive passed by EU Parliament

This article was nominated for deletion on December 27, 2005, and the result was to keep the article. The archived version of the deletion debate can be found here.

This has serious storage implications. I work for an unnamed ISP that operates as a webhost provider.

In our active farm, we have approximately 130 systems. The average system generates 3G of logfiles per day for weblogs, and another 1G for email logs. I'm excluding FTP logs, as theyre primarly for account updates rather than end-user services.

At the rate of 4G/day, the systems generate 1.46T of logs per year. When you count this against a 130 server farm, which is relatively tiny on the scale of things (yahoo/geocities, aol, etc), it comes to 200T/year. The 24 month retention requirement comes to 200T of data, or approximately 120 400G hard drives, assuming reasonable lookup and indexing were necessary.

This means no ISP in their right mind in the EU would be willing to follow the law. This will result almost directly in a loss of webhosting businesses in the EU, and a sharp jump in non-EU webhosting (which is primarly US-based at the moment).

This law is a Bad Idea(TM). I used to think America sucked (I'm a US citizen), but suddenly the EU sucks more. Lawmakers that legislate for the EU need to be awakened regarding the impact theyre about to place on datacenters in the EU.

NPOV

Please add in more content (including, perhaps, a quote from one of the bill's supporters), as this article as it stands is biased against the ruling. --MrMiscellanious (talk) (contribs) 20:55, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

(signed: jbevren)

No, I disagree about the need for a quote. It does clearly need "langauge sanitization", but a quote from supporters is unnecessary. Once the POV langauge turds are gone, it will fly fine. Nyarlathotep 18:58, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I think it would be nice to include, but if there isn't one readily available, don't worry about it too much (I could search for one). --MrMiscellanious (talk) (contribs) 23:59, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I have rewritten the article

The original article was empty of some vital information as to the technical specifications of what is recorded. It appears that most ISPs have not actually understood the text, which appears to leave the option open for authorities to require the logging of every single packet of data.

I've also tried to provide some more context for this directive, since it's not as important in itself as it is significant of a legislative process that seems (and this is a biased personal opinion) out of control.

There is a "democracy deficit" in Europe, and this law is a symptom of that. The "Big Brother" term was originally used for the UK data retention act. It was not my invention.

--Pieter Hintjens, FFII

Thanks,do you have any examples of pro-directive quotes? As such some balance to the article is needed as indicated previously?

There is no split of opinion that I'm aware of with respect to this directive except between the drafters of the law and civil society. I've not read a single article justifying or rationalising the law, and indeed it would be hard for a serious journalist to do so, given that the law has such basic flaws. Even if the principle of state surveillance of all citizens was accepted (and this is extremely sensitive), the directive cannot actually 'work'. -- PH

Reference to EP report on Echelon

I've added a reference to a report written by the EP in 2001 which documents some of the problems with state surveillance systems (the case was Echelon, the USUK surveillance system).

The EP report highlights industrial espionage as one of the major risks of such surveillance, and applauds the European Convention on Human Rights as specifically forbidding such types of surveillance.

The report states that "even if the intelligence service merely records data such as the time and duration of calls and the numbers dialled, this represents a violation of privacy", and "only in a 'police state' is the unrestricted interception of communications permitted by government authorities."

Ironically, the rapporteur, Gerhard Schmid voted in agreement with all of the most stringent aspects of the directive.

--PH

Source

Can someone add a link to the directive itself, I can't seem to find it in the article, and the one I've seen says that the goverments have to reimbruse the providers for the costs...

The only official document available for now is the amendments adopted by European Parliament in its first reading:

- List of ammendments adopted by European Parliament. Note that this does not show articles that were not ammended.

- Commission's original proposal

The final text will be the original proposal modified by the EP's amendments.

--Pieter Hintjens 14:51, 1 January 2006 (UTC)